Conflict of interest
Conflict of interest exists when an author has financial or personal interests that may influence his or her actions in regard to the authors' work, manuscript, or decisions. Conflicts of interest that exist, or that are perceived to exist, for individual authors in connection with the content of this paper should be disclosed to DCConsult in the cover letter to the content manager and in the authorship form.

Funding sources
Sources of financial support for an author (such as grants, funding sources, equipment, and supplies) should be clearly stated in the authorship form.

Permissions
It is the author's responsibility to secure all copyright permissions and permission to state names or institutions in the acknowledgments and provide these to DCConsult content manager. Illustrations or content from other publications (print or electronic) must be submitted with written permission from the publisher (and author if required) and must be acknowledged in the manuscript.

Copy editing
All papers accepted for publication are subject to copy-editing and revision as may be necessary to ensure clarity, conciseness, correct usage, and conformance to approved style. Authors will have the opportunity to approve revisions made during the copy-editing process during the reviewing of the copy.

Authors may send queries concerning the submission process, paper status, or review procedures to the content manager at CM@dcconsult.com.

Recommended files size
It is recommended that files no greater than 2MB are uploaded during the submissions process.

Manuscript format
The paper should be in double-spaced format. Do not break any words (hyphenate) at the end of any line and do not insert hard page breaks.

Terminology
Standard spelling and terminology should be used whenever possible. Avoid creating new terms or acronyms for entities that already exist.

Units of Measurement
Researchers and authors considering submission of manuscripts to DCConsult should begin to adopt the International System of Units (SI) as their primary system of measurement as quickly as it is feasible.

Abbreviations and symbols
Use only standard abbreviations for units of measurement, statistical terms, biological references, journal names, etc. The full term should precede its abbreviation for the first use in the manuscript, unless it is a standard unit of measurement.

Title page
The title page should contain the following article and author information:

Article information:

___ the title of the article (concise, but informative);
___ a short running head of no more than 40 characters (count letters and spaces);
___ the word count for the text (word count excludes abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references);
___ the number of figures;
___ the number of tables;
___ up to 5 short phrases in bullet form that emphasize the key learning points of the article
___ a short description of the manuscript to appear in DCConsult Highlights, consisting of approximately two sentences and of no more than 40 words.

Author information:

___ first name, middle initial, and last name of each author, with highest academic degree(s);
___ title, position of each author
___ names of department(s) and institution(s) to which work should be attributed of each author;
___ for the corresponding author (responsible for correspondence, proofreading, and reprint requests), the name, email, address, phone, and fax number.
___ High resolution photo of the submitting author, for use on DCConsult
___ A short bio/CV of the submitting author

Acknowledgments
Acknowledge only those who have made substantive contributions to the paper itself.

Funding sources and conflicts of interest
Statements about funding sources and conflicts of interests are stated here. If there were no funding sources or identified conflicts of interest to declare, then this should be clearly stated in this section.

References
Authors are responsible for accurate reference and citation information, especially accuracy of author names, journal titles, volume numbers, and page numbers. References should be numbered consecutively when they are first used in the text. Reference citation in the text should be in superscript format and after punctuation (eg, The quick fox jumped over the dog.1). References should be listed in numeric order (not alphabetically) following the text pages. The original citation number assigned to a reference should be reused each time the reference is cited in the text, regardless of its previous position in the text: do not assign it another number. References that are only used in tables or figure legends should be numbered in the sequence established by the first use of the particular table or figure in the text.

Only references that provide support for a particular statement in the text, tables, and/or figures should be used. Reference or referring to unpublished work should be avoided. Excessive use of references should be avoided.

Reference style
The format for a typical journal article is as follows:

- Last name of author(s) and their initials in capitals separated by a space with a comma separating each author. (List all authors when 6 or fewer; when 7 or more, list only the first 6 and add et al.)
- Title of article with first word capitalized and all other words in lower case, except names of persons, places, etc.
- Name of journal, abbreviated according to Index Medicus http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/serials/lji.html ; year of publication (followed by a semicolon); volume number (followed by a colon); and inclusive pages of article (with redundant number dropped, ie, 105-10).